Key members of the US Catholic hierarchy are on hand for the Leadership Conference of Women Religious convention underway this week in Nashville.

Church officials remain in a standoff with the liberal leadership of the group, which represents a sizable majority of America's Catholic nuns.

The big question will be whether one side blinks.

The rift opened in 2012 when the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ordered the nuns, accused of "radical feminism," to revise their statutes. Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain was assigned to oversee the sisters.

Though Pope Francis, with his stirring language of social justice, has been reorganizing the Roman Curia and Vatican Bank, he has not taken a public position on the battle with the nuns, which began under his predecessor, Pope Benedict.

Sister Elizabeth Johnson will be honored at this week's convention, which might be taken as an assertion of their business as usual. Johnson's book, "Quest for the Living God,"was slammed by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which contended it "completely undermines the Gospels."

The book, used in many Catholic universities and high schools, presents a range of ideas about the diversity of mankind and questions established notions of who God is.

The nuns' strategy has been a flood-the-zone approach to their discussions with church officials, including Sartain, who is in attendance in Nashville.

If they do not conform, the ultimate penalty would be the loss of their designation as one of two groups of religious sisters with official standing in the Vatican. The other group of American sisters is much smaller and more orthodox. Leadership conference superiors represent 80 percent of America's 57,000 sisters.

Should Francis intervene, and side with those incensed at the direction the nuns have taken in more engagement with the poor, gay and marginalized, the sisters would become another Catholic group without Rome's approval — a rather large constituency, some might argue.

But depriving the Leadership Conference of Women Religious of official status would have repercussions for Francis. Not since John XXIII in the early 1960s has a pope achieved such popularity on the global stage, espousing international peace and justice, gaining respect of Jews and Muslims.

To punish sisters who have gone into the trenches of the poor and castoff would seem a contradiction of Francis's agenda of radical mercy.

GlobalPost religion blogger Jason Berry is co-producer of the Frontline documentary "Secrets of the Vatican." This commentary first appeared on GlobalPost.